Parissa

Parissa came to LiFT looking to revisit the design and implementation of their existing eCommerce website because it just wasn’t performing to it’s expectations based upon a very low conversion rate.

Built on an old shopping cart CMS and they new they could do better. There was a forum with community discussion happening but it was on a completely separate site and not leading to sales. They even shut down the forum because it became unmanageable. It was actually turned off when we first engaged with Parissa. There was wealth of amazing conversation happening around how people were using the products

Our Assessment

The existing site wasn’t engaging customers by the core values that you would experience if you picked up the product on a shelf. The site very much felt like a print catalog and had very little imagery being used.

The Strategy

Connect the audience with the product by capturing the conversation and mapping it to the product being discussed. The intent was to create a bi-directional relationship that would drive increased sales. Simple.

User Experience

Draw out the importance of the all natural ingredients, incorporate how-to videos and call for user-generated tips that could be posted to the respective product pages.

We quickly realized that the existing site was designed with a visual bounding box around the product box and was creating a busy interface that was not ‘breathing’. The goal was to simplify the products and integrate the the new how-to videos with the product information. There was also a need to clearly express the natural ingredients for their products which was a key factor in it being more expensive.

In terms of managing the user generated content, we enabled the ability for Parissa to select a “best” user comment/tip and promote it to be present on the product detail page at all times. This was easy for them to do and proved to be a great way to engage with their customers by showing them that their product experience was important to the product’s messaging and ongoing promotion.

Tech

Once the strategy was clear, a technology assessment was done to determine the best solution for supporting the merged content strategy validate that Drupal (CMS) integrated with UberCart (Storefront) was going to be the solution that would enable the given strategy of merging the community with the products. Drupal treats eCommerce objects in the same way as it treats information objects like blog posts so we were able to easily map the eComm object.

We also looked at Drupal + Magento solution. It was not as flexible as the UberCart plugin within because Magento is is an entire infrastructure unto itself which would have introduced a double sign in. In this case the UX dictated the technology constraints.